The extensionist of the 2010's is faced with a multitude of choices concerning where he or she will be most effective in transmitting good information to the clientele he has been assigned. While traditional formats like face to face meetings and on site farm calls still work, others liked mailed newsletters have been set aside in many cases for more timely, content rich and effective media, including vehicles like this blog.
On point, some of us Advisors and Specialists have taken to playing around a bit with Twitter, the microblog site which allows a person to keep others up to date on their own doings without having spend hours crafting an article. Personally, if one's business is to connect with a larger audience, I think Twitter can work.
I don't express myself so well on this point, so I'm including below a (mildly inflammatory) piece by Barry Ritholz, a blogger whom I follow pretty closely concerning the use of social media to connect with people in the professional space. The highlight in the middle is mine:
"For years we heard about people tweeting their every move. If you think this is how Twitter still works, you're probably e-mailing your friends jokes on AOL. Twitter has moved on. The looky-loos have long departed. The self-righteous wannabes tweeting over a hundred thousand times are living in their own tiny silos, in their own echo chambers. That's one of the great things about Twitter, when you see somebody hating on you you can check them out and in almost all cases they have almost no followers and no one sees the hate, so you can relax. This is not the network television of yore, this is one jerk with a megaphone in the middle of the prairie with no impact.
So you've got experts in every field tweeting about their findings, what interests them.
When breaking news occurs a hive emerges with tons of data... if you can't adjust on the fly, you don't deserve to be on Twitter, you need remedial reading classes."
I'll rephrase in less forthright language. Twitter has moved on from being the redoubt of the solipsist and the extremist, as in "hey, look where I am" or "hey, this is what I think" over and over again, to a medium for experts to connect quickly, effectively and share with those who are interested in what they think.
Not all a bad thing.
Whole post is below.
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